Final Fantasy: The Dream Within
by AsianScaper
Summary: Based on the movie: "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", this is an attempt done poste haste to explain a few things...and retain the loss, hope, and life of this wonderful project. Read and review!


  
**Title:** _Final Fantasy: The Dream Within_   
**Author/s:** AsianScaper   
**Summary:** This describes the loss of our beautiful heroine in the movie 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within' as she holds her beloved in her arms. Please read and review!   
**Disclaimer:** I don't own Final Fantasy. People who deserve it do.   
**Rating:** G   
**Category:** Drama   
**Feedback:** Send your criticism, comments, or insights to asianscaper@hotmail.com   
**Archiving:** Put it anywhere you wish, just email me the URL.   
**Spoilers:** If you don't know what happened at the end of the movie, don't read this just yet.   
**Dedication:** This is dedicated to the Final Fantasy crew who made this magical masterpiece possible.   
**Author's Note:** This was done SUPER posthaste. I wrote it right after I watched the movie because I was compelled to do it. I hope you'd be able to appreciate this bit of expression even if there are extreme mistakes in grammar. The poem at the end is actually also posted as "The Scourge of the World" and I thought it was fitting that it, too, be put here. Cheers!

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_I dream…as I always have, yet they haunt my thoughts and all I do, all that I ever have become, is filled with them. My world is crying, the harrowing heavens sigh with their abuse, and the stars look upon me like the millions of eyes that fall witness to my planet's pain. Her sorrows. Her joys. Her people._

Was there a place to begin with? A time when all this began? An age, perhaps, to start all ages? 

Heaped upon the clouded shades of her eyes were dreams of an infinite pattern that stretched from one end of space to another, eternity to eternity, the black voice beyond everybody's heads, tangible yet ultimately unreachable. 

The colorless tapestry from the limitless void called space, myriad in texture, disappeared with the mere touch of a hand but appeared when one's back was to it. After all, the dream's definition lay on that. Once it was ignored, it merely faded into nothingness. Without a consciousness to provide pillars for this tremendous structure, it would collapse and fade. A human being's will was all it took for a dream to take on an existence. The presence was there, never to be seen in its entirety because the only sense which made it truly palpable was the touch of depressions and minute heaves in the design of this temporal vision made by the human consciousness.

_Yes, a dream…_

Her tears flowing with continuity unknown to her, she brought her eyes to look at the man she held in her arms.

She stared into the closed eyes of a love long lost, his once dancing hair unmoving in the wind of a world scarred from the gale of misfortune, his breath forever stolen by the cruel grasp of death. His skin that had an aura of life were caps of ice on either side of the world, drowning her in frigid snows of an eternal winter, warming her like the consanguinity of blood with blood.

With his head resting upon her chest, he must have heard the heart still beating there. He slept with such tranquility that she envied him yet she knew that he would die for nothing if she began to entertain the ease of a less rewarding path.

The platform they rested their tired bodies on, moved in seeming correspondence to the new beginning this dawn personified. Higher and higher still it rose. The sun peeked from the splits within the rocks, flickering along the path, an unconstant companion beneath the earth. Unbelievably, clouds moved against the sky, moving across an infinite sheet of melted sapphire like ships upon the sea. She shuddered to think of what the surface of her planet looked like now but all that had to be done had passed. All the pain had been dealt with, until now. She was bursting with her own indescribable feelings...a mixture of sadness and joy with sadness clambering for the higher peak.

Pureness ran like an unleashed river pounding into her head for her to listen to its joy. His lips had dipped its flesh into this stream of goodness and had extracted the elixir of a short yet meaningful life. There was a part of her that had been left to the depths of the underworld, a twitching soul that would never die but live a living death in everlasting darkness. All because of who she was and what she had insisted upon, to save everything if it caused her her life. But it did not cause her her life, it caused him his. Then there was that piece of her, which made her sit in the shade of the sun's light, holding that hand that had once marveled at the smooth angles of her face, remembering that pale smile which was once filled with the warmth of a sunset from above the clouds, clear and unhindered from thunder which spoke of rain. The glance that told her of things, which were meaningless in words but had forever held their meaning in her heart.

There was hope in the faded gentleness of his palm and in his regard; another diamond from the mines of sorrow slipped past her pallid cheek, shouting laments as it reached the edge of a strong jaw and bathed his uplifted face as it fled from her warmth. This tear reflected the brilliance of an emerging sun which she could almost feel and could already see. It gleamed hopefully under her watchful gaze but she didn't care for this tear but for the corporeal shell of the man beholding it. 

_I love you…_

These words slipped through her ears, still like honey seasoned with bitter seeds of an immature fruit. His voice was as real as the first time had been and even when she had seen the resignation, as a deer would die for its spirit to return once more to the planet of its birth, he had been brave enough to smile. She saw the finite sadness within his eyes, those eyes that stared at her face with the tenderness seemingly unseen from the callous hands of a soldier. The fear which had been casually set aside for her sake.

"All is shed and unknown, my love." Her strength faltered and she sobbed. She was once more swimming in the cold waters of a lake of tears, which moaned and trembled by the tide. "Did I ever tell you that I loved you?" she whispered to empty ears that would echo her voice into the verdant hills of heaven but would never answer with the vivacity of a moving tongue.

And a voice seemed to murmur like melodies in the wind, the communication of a voice without a throat, the muttered phrases of a mute who talked of nothing but happiness with the gurgled sounds of his impaired words.

_I love you…_

Indeed, there was happiness in that draft which shook her hair from its place, playing with the gentle fingers of a ghost, playing with laughter of a child.

Perhaps she had wished those words to be in the form of touch and feel but either way, she was at peace, sadly so. Yet, in her acceptance, she held on to his inert body even as she knew that he would never leave her.

There was bitterness for him, in his betrayal to her wish to be with him even as glowing phantoms crawled with the reverberating sounds of certain death. There was little space for thoughts beyond the strong grip of his big hands on her shoulders, determined for her to live against all odds, already pulling her to her salvation by helping her down that fateful ledge. He denied all fear and she had known the surrender to something greater than he in the tight feel of his hand as he held hers when she saved the world and in so doing, could never save the one person most important to her. In that last desperate moment, his body was sacrificed to the ashes and his soul marked by a noble fate.

_I love you…_

His mouth had surged with such magic when he had uttered those words.

He had left no room for her to save him and his honor, which was sweet beside his bravery, dictated the spires of an elegy to rise beyond mountains and seas, to flow with the veins of the planet. How she longed to kiss the ground that would return her caress with winds from the rivers that ran an amiable blue with his essence. How she longed to touch the petals of any rose, close memories of the soft reassurance in the curved smile of his lips, tender beyond the mettle in him. How she longed to swim in any lake, to feel his tears between her fingers as she immersed in his sacrifice.

And in the blurring vision within her eyes already wet with salty pools of water, light spiraled like it would in a kaleidoscope and bestowed kisses upon her aching eyes.

In her profound grief which dug deeper into the shrivel of hope that was her lamenting soul, she wept. The sun wept with her, his tears soaking her in a frigid kind of heat, his ethereal rays serving as spears that pierced through every patch of darkness and spread the effulgence of a burning soul. The ground shifted their colors, ululating even in its languor, stopping to pause in memory of a man who now partook in the spirit of the earth.

She was dazed, still reveling in a reverie, when an old man came running towards her, his face abundant with concern, his stride urgent yet restrained with age.

His voice was full of a veiled youth, lilting ever so slightly even with the fear that hindered the joy in seeing her alive. Hesitantly, looking at her with the gaze of a confused man, he bent on one knee and gently brought his finger's to the powerful neck of Gray's body only to find the constant beat of a soul's rhythm gone.

It all registered in the way he trembled and collapsed to sit, drawing a sharp breathe, bringing his gnarled hands to an equally wrinkled forehead. Shaking his head, he waited for Aki to say something…anything.

"Doctor," Aki choked, unable even to lift a hand for the weight of her beloved was pulling her down with him. 

"Dear child. My poor, poor, child," he muttered as he embraced her over Gray's idle corpse. Fresh tears moved with the tide of her sorrow as she buried her face into his shoulders and cried in muffled sobs of a pain deep within the recesses of her injured self. The knife had buried itself and she could do nothing, would do nothing, to pluck it from its place. Shadows danced and the unsubstantial tendrils of the dead threatened to take part in her.

Her mentor, the good doctor, was unable to comfort her even as he patted her back in honest sympathy, whispering words of comfort and of hope. At last, her tears ceased and she was able to pull herself to her feet.

Hesitant but determined, she helped the doctor to put the body in the gurney and carry it to the ship.

She did not like the way Gray's body was unresponsive to her touch, the inability of his muscles to move beneath her palms. Death revealed itself in the pliant way his arms moved across his sides as the old man lifted the body from Aki's grasp.

Beside the body, the white of a lab coat contrasted with Gray's shirt, tattered and torn. The colors emulated that of the sky, which was now transforming from gray to flying cottons of glimmering bright hues of white. Again, the colors danced in capers of a nonsensical ballad.

Her gaze, though, still observed Gray's hands, lifeless in all aspects. 

_Moving, moving…_

Never clenching those strong fists that had more than held weapons, but her soul.

_Oh, God. Gray, don't do this to me!_

In her agony, she dragged the gurney along with her with more determination to surrender Gray's body to the ground. The towering structure of the ship loomed not far ahead and its shadow encased them as they grew even nearer. Then, as she began to enter the ship with a rueful gait, stepping unto the ramp while her boots clicked against the metal, another rampant wind forced her to stop.

The doctor was nonplussed. "What is it?"

She did not answer the doctor's inquiry but instead, looked behind her, knowing beyond all miracles of knowledge that somebody had never left and was watching her from all sides, whispering to her soul the sighs of the universe, of this earth. She dropped her gaze to the corpse and realized that it was an empty shell of profound quality yet an empty shell nonetheless. Meaningless without the spirit that drives, that makes it move with vivacity.

_I love you…_

The strangled sound of a laugh emerged from her throat and she began to walk once more, her heart heavy yet reassured. She looked back at the wasteland and she found the standing figure of a man, reaching out to her with the hallowed hands of an apparition. The memories flooded back to haunt her and the picture summoned by this figure was the incorporeal hand that had tried to hold on to her even as he was sucked by the lifeblood of her planet. 

And he smiled.

_I love you..._

And she, too, smiled.

A beloved of all planets. A citizen of the soil.

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_Tallaine a Gaea_   
Scourge of the World

  
Above the trenches of hell foul, fields of gluttonous lust   
Burning clouds shower embers in opaque drops of ruby dust   
That speaks of tears beyond heaven's eyes and grief from wombs benign,   
Seizing equivocations, tearing stainless sentries to whine

Golden-eyed god of the blighted quiver draws the shortened spear,   
In fetid flowers' juice dipped and polished with rhymed hymns of fear,   
Flees a beautiful bow in flickering flight across a somber strain   
That pleas for mercy lost, uncertain tongues of lies and artful bane

Forms, fixed curves of a mellow moon dressed in wreaths of laurel leaves   
Mock the bent bow and cause mires of mud that stain their gorgon grieves   
To congeal creeks that sigh in brief melody of heaven's roles   
To slay the munificent heart with black swords of stolen souls

The children's bereaved moans, a rhapsodic note on Eris' harp   
Play against her charmed fingers and voice of hollowed verse so sharp   
Every babe made to suckle on this bitter gall swirling dark   
Had piths of continence drained, a dirge from the liberal lark

Pestilence embraced in cold tendrils the sphere of earth and sky   
Of the wind's flute, myriad sounds, of a river's elated sigh   
What melancholy in this world, what sins corrupt the upright!   
The malfeasance in a plague's permanence begs for farther sight!

Yet the quill that writes from inheritance of the Muses' tales   
Speaks worth into ears of mortal cause, grants winds to rippling sails   
Dire fangs with tainted tips, this great suffering in time will soothe   
With help of the worn hand and noble heart that beats for truth

  
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**-The End-**


End file.
